Against expectations I’ve actually done quite a lot of tidying and sorting today. I have pounced on the back bedroom with some vigour and shuffled piles of stuff into different piles of stuff, decreased the box content of the room and, in fact, started to uncover something that I believe was once a desk.
I have a pile of computing equipment the likes of which I’ve not seen for a while; the Laserjet 4, complete with JetDirect is sat atop my RiscPC which astonishingly can see the network. Of course, OmniClient is being it’s usual argumentative self and I can’t seem to persuade it to connect. And WebsterXL seems to have decided that it’ll connect only to google’s homepage, and nothing else. It’s not helped that the Acorn Keyboard after 2 years of having crap piled on it appears to have finally bitten the dust (sadly :( ) and that after so long on Linux, Mac and Windows I’ve started to forget how to use the RiscPC. To be fair, I only connected it ‘because it was there’. It’s the sort of thing I feel silly for having spent time on, but at the same time it’s such an important part of my formative years that I’m rather pleased to see it still working. I’d’ve quite liked to use OvPro to produce the zine with Kathryn, but it looks like it may take me a long time to get it working properly – if I ever can. I’m tempted to nuke it and install everything fresh… but also I’d forgotten that with only 4Mb of ram it can only do 1024×768 in a decent colour depth. It’s sad really, it was a phenominally advanced machine when it was released, and now it’s put to shame by a cheap PC running an OS it was never designed to run.
But, on the plus side the Mac went ‘print to a laserprinter on the network? Why of course’. Ahh. Mac, we love you. Turning off DHCP on the white box of internet doom home hub seems to have improved connectivity; now I just need to clear the desk of crap – although we’re pretty good now. Down to last few ods and sods.
I’ve thrown a bunch of stuff onto freecycle too, and I’ve finally found the singles that seemed to have disappeared when I moved from Ashford to here.
Anyhow, so that’s been my day really; here’s the results of the chaos decreasing act – the whole computing environment (some of this stuff has moved in from the bedroom, so the mess hasn’t decreased as much as I’d hoped; this shot is also an exercise in adding as many notes to a photo as possible) and the desk. Although it’s not really ‘tidyer’; everything’s actually connected now and there’s the possibility that Kathryn can use the desk with her Mac should she wish to – just by moving the hackintosh keyboard. Also, the Laserprinter is up and running, so resume printing should be a nice simple, and very professional looking affair. Everything’s still kinda dusty though.
Still, it’s progress for definite.